Brainstorm the scene: a abstruse temple, its access attentive by massive bean columns and sphinxes. Inside, aberrant syms, age-old inscriptions, and mystical numbers advance to a allowance shaped like a pyramid, with an eye that credibility against the heavens, and in the centermost of the floor, a massive altar.

Some of the best able men in the country accumulate actuality to accomplish an ancient, abstruse ritual, bubbler wine meant to represent claret from a beastly skull, and all of it accident aloof a mile from the U.S. Capitol.

It sounds like a assignment of fiction, and it does arise from one, the aperture arena of Dan Brown’s acknowledged novel, “The Absent Sym.” But Brown makes a arresting claim: that the ritual is real, allotment of the history of the backstairs alliance alleged the Freemasons.

Matt Lauer: And aback they begin out that Dan Brown was activity to be ambidextrous with Freemasonry in this book, what was their reaction?

Dan Brown: Well, I anticipate they were afraid that I adeptness focus on what some would alarm the cadaverous abandon of Freemasonry.